Biarritz Is Where European Old Money Discovered the Atlantic

Biarritz was a modest Basque whaling and fishing village until 1855, when Empress Eugénie, the Spanish-born wife of France’s Napoleon III, built a seaside villa on its beach and began spending her summers there. The villa, expanded and remodelled over the following decades, still stands today as the Hôtel du Palais, and its construction is generally credited with turning Biarritz from a fishing settlement into one of the most fashionable resort towns in Europe.

A resort built by royal visits

Once Eugénie had made Biarritz fashionable, European royalty followed. Britain’s Edward VII, both as Prince of Wales and later as king, was a regular visitor from the 1880s onward, popular enough locally that a street near the town centre still carries his name. Queen Victoria stopped in Biarritz during a visit late in her reign, and the town drew a rotating cast of Spanish, Russian and other European royal and aristocratic families through the Belle Époque, all documented in the grand hotels and casinos built to receive them.

Surf town, old-money coastline

Biarritz’s surf history has a specific, well-documented starting point: the American screenwriter Peter Viertel, in Biarritz in 1956 to work on the film adaptation of The Sun Also Rises, brought a surfboard with him and is generally credited with introducing surfing to the French Atlantic coast. That history now sits alongside the town’s older resort identity rather than replacing it. The Grande Plage, the town’s central beach beneath the Hôtel du Palais, is as likely today to have surfers in the water as it is sunbathers on hotel loungers.

Why it endures

Biarritz’s position close to the Spanish border, at the western end of the Basque Country, has kept it a base for a quieter, more established European set than the Mediterranean resorts further south and east, one built on inherited habit rather than modern celebrity-spotting media attention.

Traveller tips

• The Grande Plage and the Hôtel du Palais are both easily seen on a walk through central Biarritz, no booking required.
• Biarritz’s surf season runs nearly year-round, but autumn brings the most consistent swell.
• Biarritz-Bayonne-Anglet airport connects to several French and European cities, with San Sebastián also within an hour’s drive across the Spanish border.
• Book well ahead for August, the town’s busiest month with French domestic holidaymakers.